A common mode of printing in a networked environment requires a user to select a preferred network printer to which a print request will be sent, often without knowledge of how many requests or pages may be positioned in a queue ahead of their request or whether resources may be needed at that particular printer. Such a situation can cause unnecessary delays and multiple requests for the same document, resulting in wasted resources, especially in networked environments where printers are located in another room or even on another floor from where the user is located.
A solution to this problem involves the implementation of a system in which a user can walk to any printer in the network pool and request that his or her job be released and printed at that particular printer. This “walk and request” mode of printing is the basis of what is sometimes referred to as “pull printing” or related technologies such as those marketed under the trademark FOLLOWME®. Current technology enabling pull printing however may still lead to a perceptible delay in printing that occurs once the user at a supported printer selects a job to be printed. One reason for this delay is that the user's submitted source document must first be converted by the applicable print server to a print ready document (i.e., in a format compatible to the selected printer), and then only sent to the printer selected by the user. This forces the user to select the correct print format when submitting the print job for printing, but because the user may not know from which printer the job will be actually printed, the user will not have a way of knowing ahead of time which printer format to select.
This problem may be exacerbated for portable electronic devices that have limited computing capacity and correspondingly limited functionality. For example, some portable mobile devices may include enough memory to store a specific number of documents, but may not be able to execute larger applications that are necessary to render the stored documents into a format that is compatible with a particular printer for printing.
The current disclosure discloses a system and method to automatically predict a networked printer a user will use in a pull printing mode, and pre-convert a print job to a format compatible with the predicted networked printer to avoid printing delays.